New details from Newt Gingrich’s contracts worth $1.6 million with Freddie Mac show that the Republican hopeful wasn’t just a boardroom consultant, but served as a high-profile booster for the beleaguered organization. He even gave a rallying speech to dozens of the group’s political action committee donors in the spring of 2007.

Shortly after the “rah, rah” speech, as one source described it, Gingrich gave an interview for the Freddie Mac website, where he supported the group’s model at length. The interview is no longer on Freddie’s site.

Gingrich said in the interview that Freddie has “made an important contribution to home ownership and the housing finance system,” even though many Republicans revile it.

Gingrich has dribbled out the details of his relationship with Freddie Mac over the last few weeks, giving Mitt Romney repeated opportunities to accuse him of supporting the very entity many Republicans point to as the driving force behind the housing bubble. The issue is coming to the fore again, just as the GOP primary race enters Florida — ground zero of the housing crisis.

Romney went after Gingrich Monday night on his firm’s $1.6 million worth of Freddie Mac contracts during the NBC debate in Tampa, Fla. saying: “You could have spoken out in a way to say these guys are wrong, this needs to end. But instead, you were being paid by them. You were making over $1 million at the same time people in Florida were being hurt by millions of dollars.”

Gingrich offered a technical defense saying he was not an official lobbyist for the group.

“I have never, ever gone and done any lobbying,” Gingrich said. He described himself as “a consultant.” Gingrich also made the point that he personally profited about $35,000 from the contracts.

Previously, Gingrich claimed he was a “historian” for the failing mortgage giant, a line that his GOP rivals, like Romney and Jon Huntsman, attacked as absurd.

The disparity between Gingrich’s description of his work for Freddie, and the new examples suggests that attacks from his rivals aren’t about to go away, even as the campaign tries to do damage control. They released some details of one of the contracts before the debate on Monday.

On April 3, 2007, Gingrich gave a presentation to employee donors of Freddie Mac’s political action committee, according to several sources familiar with the presentation. It was the “rah, rah” speech described by a source who worked closely with Freddie at the time. Newt spoke about what was going on in the country and he offered his view of the issues.

Freddie Mac’s PAC contributed $327,000 to federal candidates in the 2006 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Nearly 130 employees and spouses of employees contributed $330,000 over that same time period.

That same day, Gingrich spoke to a larger Freddie Mac employee cabal where he explained his vision for transforming bureaucratic government into a “21st century organization” — a signature talking point for Gingrich who focused on technology in government early on.

Later that month, Gingrich also gave a “feature interview” that appeared on Freddie Mac’s website providing an extensive Q&A where the former Speaker of the House defended the government-sponsored enterprise model, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO.

Gingrich went so far as to say that “I’m convinced that if NASA were a GSE, we probably would be on Mars today.”

Freddie Mac declined to comment. A Gingrich spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The housing GSEs have made an important contribution to homeownership and the housing finance system,” Gingrich said in the interview. “We have a much more liquid an stable housing finance system than we would have without GSEs. So while we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about fundamentally changing their role or the model itself.”

Further Gingrich acknowledged that this is not a viewpoint conservatives normally embrace. “Well, it’s not a point of view libertarians would embrace,” he said in the interview. “But I am more in the Alexander Hamilton-Teddy Roosevelt tradition of conservatism. I recognize that there are times when you need government to help spur private enterprise and economic development.”